What was the "fiasco" of the year?

I voted for 38 Studios. I mean, Schilling lost his entire fortune, something like 50 million. And Rhode Island taxpayers also took a hit (as far as I understand, but maybe there were measures that mitigated that some). In any event, that's a fucking fiasco if there's ever been one.

But I suppose the ME3 ending created more shockwaves in the gaming community itself.

38 Studios was the fiasco that made me cringe and wince in sympathetic pain the most.

Its the Mass Effect "fiasco".

@feliciano182 said:

@Demoskinos said:

Indeed. The fervor around it did in some circles at least get a bit misguided. There were people however who were legit angry that were able to articulate their dislike beyond "Fuck You Bioware!"

I don't know, even the most articulate seem to be missing some pretty important points.

REGARDLESS, the initial reaction was what was really without any merit, no people, Electronic Arts is not worse than Bank Of America, wake the fuck up.

No, the most articulate arguments referenced the fact that the ending was poorly written from a narrative, structural, and logical sense. In the last ten minutes, the level of narrative coherence takes a sharp nosedive, and then the game asks the player to make an arbitrary choice with up to three options, depending on your galactic readiness. The endings were then largely the same with different colored lighting, and did not reflect the choices that the player had made throughout the trilogy. More damning, however, was that the project lead Casey Hudson had clearly stated prior to the game's release that the ending would not come down to pick A, B, or C.

Except that's exactly how the game ends.

This argument has nothing to do with EA's influences or Bioware as a whole. It is specifically about how the people in charge of writing the ending completely dropped the ball when it came to crafting a conclusion that fit within previously established logic and laws of the game's universe. It is, simply put, a poorly told, poorly written ending, and the whole "fiasco" was crafted by the fan outrage that followed.

Origin made that one mistake people took advantage of earlier this year.

i voted for ME3.

the whole sexism thing is kinda fucking stupid.

The ME3 thing doesn't even come close to either 38 Studios or the sexism issues. 38 was easily the biggest fiasco. That's probably the only one that was mentioned by national media and it also effected the most people.

@Gerhabio said:

The ME thing was UNPRECEDENTED

How so? And how are some of those other things not unprecedented?

38 studios, easily. Loads of people lost their jobs and their asses you guys.

For me, it was the whole fallout after Aris' comments on Cross Assault, and how some game journos (especially Kotaku), handled their coverage of it. And yes, that includes Klepek. This probably was a bigger deal to me because I'm more plugged into the FGC than any other gaming subculture.

I heard the most about War-Z. Not because it's the most recent or anything but because that's the one most of my friends are talking about oddly enough. It's also so odd how it all went about and especially with Valve stepping in pulling it from Steam and refunding customers.

I'd say ME3 gets a close second though.

GB being bought by CBSi
 

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

As much as the other options were good candidates the whole WarZ fiasco wins. Has Steam ever pulled a game because of negative fan reaction?

The Me3 ending because of how fucking dumb the whole situation was. Bioware should've just said "Deal with it" and walked away because fans will never be satiated.

Doritosgate, I found the whole thing fascinating and a little disconcerting when a place like Giantbomb got pulled into the mix. I don't think they are some kind of saint like super men, but I also think that they are all on the same page and very dedicated to the idea of writing about games without worrying about being accountable to shadowy PR men.

The ME3 kerfuffle was ridiculous and childish. The sexism stuff is at least an important topic and if anything was chuffed off by the avg gamer. Bringing in the rear (and a topic OP didn't have in the poll) is the the post-Sandy Hook "vidja games are evil" debate popping up again.

I'd say Mass Effect. That shit pretty much single-handedly ruined an entire franchise.

@DeF said:

@Hailinel said:

The sexism talk. For all of the idiocy behind Retake Mass Effect and the strange details of Doritosgate, too many journalists were too clumsy in rushing out to shame developers for being sexist when they barely knew anything about the games in question. Also, for all of the criticism of one developer's comment about "protecting" Lara, a lot of white knights came out of the woodwork to attack that comment.

Word!

The way this was handled frustrated me to no end. Especially on the Bombcast. When people who talk about this stuff professionally make comments on the level of a typical news story user-comment, something is seriously messed up.

And then a week later when everyone found out that it was a woman writing everything it was like "oh, I guess it's okay now..." and then you never heard about again......

Yeah, that whole thing was kind of shitty.

For me personally it was the War Z. I was so looking forward to this game...

38 Studios and THQ's nosedive rank as numero uno and dos respectively for me.

@Hailinel:

No, the most articulate arguments referenced the fact that the ending was poorly written from a narrative, structural, and logical sense.

If you want to be wrong about this entire argument, then by all means do start.

In the last ten minutes, the level of narrative coherence takes a sharp nosedive, and then the game asks the player to make an arbitrary choice with up to three options, depending on your galactic readiness. The endings were then largely the same with different colored lighting, and did not reflect the choices that the player had made throughout the trilogy. More damning, however, was that the project lead Casey Hudson had clearly stated prior to the game's release that the ending would not come down to pick A, B, or C.

We can have discussions about how the endings seem largely unrelated to what you did throughout the trilogy, we can even talk about all the smoke Casey Hudson blew away to favor the marketing of the last game.

But to say that the three endings are the same, that the content in each one is negligible because they all "look alike" is precisely what's wrong with videogamers today, and why the medium can't be taken as seriously as film or literature. Despite the flaws of the ending, it was still a great work of writing that had infinitely much more content than most modern pieces of science fiction, and a few vague, broad statements from you, or anyone else, hardly do anything to justify the absurd wave of outrage and entitlement that came from this whole issue.

This argument has nothing to do with EA's influences or Bioware as a whole. It is specifically about how the people in charge of writing the ending completely dropped the ball when it came to crafting a conclusion that fit within previously established logic and laws of the game's universe. It is, simply put, a poorly told, poorly written ending, and the whole "fiasco" was crafted by the fan outrage that followed.

Nope, not at all..........to pretty much everything you've said here.

Now, you can speak in widely broad statements all day or get down and dirty friend, your choice.

The Lara Croft thing was kinda terrible. 
Lots of people going "OMG! Have you heard that Lara grunts and moans like a woman when she's getting beaten up or smashes into the side of a mountain?" 
"WHAT?" Are you serious?" 
"Yes! but that's not all. At one point, this man grabs her arm" 
"OMG RAPE!" 
"I KNOW! HE TOUCHED HER ARM!"  
 
And that's it. 
 
Fucking idiots

@feliciano182 said:

@Hailinel:

No, the most articulate arguments referenced the fact that the ending was poorly written from a narrative, structural, and logical sense.

If you want to be wrong about this entire argument, then by all means do start.

In the last ten minutes, the level of narrative coherence takes a sharp nosedive, and then the game asks the player to make an arbitrary choice with up to three options, depending on your galactic readiness. The endings were then largely the same with different colored lighting, and did not reflect the choices that the player had made throughout the trilogy. More damning, however, was that the project lead Casey Hudson had clearly stated prior to the game's release that the ending would not come down to pick A, B, or C.

We can have discussions about how the endings seem largely unrelated to what you did throughout the trilogy, we can even talk about all the smoke Casey Hudson blew away to favor the marketing of the last game.

But to say that the three endings are the same, that the content in each one is negligible because they all "look alike" is precisely what's wrong with videogamers today, and why the medium can't be taken as seriously as film or literature. Despite the flaws of the ending, it was still a great work of writing that had infinitely much more content than most modern pieces of science fiction, and a few vague, broad statements from you, or anyone else, hardly do anything to justify the absurd wave of outrage and entitlement that came from this whole issue.

This argument has nothing to do with EA's influences or Bioware as a whole. It is specifically about how the people in charge of writing the ending completely dropped the ball when it came to crafting a conclusion that fit within previously established logic and laws of the game's universe. It is, simply put, a poorly told, poorly written ending, and the whole "fiasco" was crafted by the fan outrage that followed.

Nope, not at all..........to pretty much everything you've said here.

Now, you can speak in widely broad statements all day or get down and dirty friend, your choice.

So you discredit his vague, broad statements with..... Vague, broad statements.

@feliciano182 said:

@Hailinel:

No, the most articulate arguments referenced the fact that the ending was poorly written from a narrative, structural, and logical sense.

If you want to be wrong about this entire argument, then by all means do start.

In the last ten minutes, the level of narrative coherence takes a sharp nosedive, and then the game asks the player to make an arbitrary choice with up to three options, depending on your galactic readiness. The endings were then largely the same with different colored lighting, and did not reflect the choices that the player had made throughout the trilogy. More damning, however, was that the project lead Casey Hudson had clearly stated prior to the game's release that the ending would not come down to pick A, B, or C.

We can have discussions about how the endings seem largely unrelated to what you did throughout the trilogy, we can even talk about all the smoke Casey Hudson blew away to favor the marketing of the last game.

But to say that the three endings are the same, that the content in each one is negligible because they all "look alike" is precisely what's wrong with videogamers today, and why the medium can't be taken as seriously as film or literature. Despite the flaws of the ending, it was still a great work of writing that had infinitely much more content than most modern pieces of science fiction, and a few vague, broad statements from you, or anyone else, hardly do anything to justify the absurd wave of outrage and entitlement that came from this whole issue.

This argument has nothing to do with EA's influences or Bioware as a whole. It is specifically about how the people in charge of writing the ending completely dropped the ball when it came to crafting a conclusion that fit within previously established logic and laws of the game's universe. It is, simply put, a poorly told, poorly written ending, and the whole "fiasco" was crafted by the fan outrage that followed.

Nope, not at all..........to pretty much everything you've said here.

Now, you can speak in widely broad statements all day or get down and dirty friend, your choice.

That does absolutely nothing to properly refute anything I have said.

Mass Effect because of how it reminds me of how TOTALLY FUCKING CRAZY this industry is right now. I don't think there's many examples in other media of someone changing the ending after it's release due to angry fan reaction. Most of the time, that just happens in the focus group tests pre-release. If games are an art, then Bioware compromised their artistic integrity without the slightest hint of shame.

I picked H because I didn't like how the Mass Effect option was worded. That game should have stood on its own and all of the people who were upset shouldn't have been pacified. Changing the ending, the DLC, the catering, the everything that developed after the game's release was an absolute shit-show. The fans looked like asses and Bioware and EA looked like hacks. By far it was the biggest fiasco of all.

@Hailinel: Hence why I gave you the opening to further explain your arguments, you're obviously free to not do so, but nobody here can simply say the endings of Mass Effect 3 were bad simply because they cry "bad writing" without having a proper understanding of what that phrase actually means.

@Iodine: Not really, I just asked him / her to develop their arguments, so that I can properly refute them.

@Hailinel said:

@feliciano182 said:

@Hailinel:

No, the most articulate arguments referenced the fact that the ending was poorly written from a narrative, structural, and logical sense.

If you want to be wrong about this entire argument, then by all means do start.

In the last ten minutes, the level of narrative coherence takes a sharp nosedive, and then the game asks the player to make an arbitrary choice with up to three options, depending on your galactic readiness. The endings were then largely the same with different colored lighting, and did not reflect the choices that the player had made throughout the trilogy. More damning, however, was that the project lead Casey Hudson had clearly stated prior to the game's release that the ending would not come down to pick A, B, or C.

We can have discussions about how the endings seem largely unrelated to what you did throughout the trilogy, we can even talk about all the smoke Casey Hudson blew away to favor the marketing of the last game.

But to say that the three endings are the same, that the content in each one is negligible because they all "look alike" is precisely what's wrong with videogamers today, and why the medium can't be taken as seriously as film or literature. Despite the flaws of the ending, it was still a great work of writing that had infinitely much more content than most modern pieces of science fiction, and a few vague, broad statements from you, or anyone else, hardly do anything to justify the absurd wave of outrage and entitlement that came from this whole issue.

This argument has nothing to do with EA's influences or Bioware as a whole. It is specifically about how the people in charge of writing the ending completely dropped the ball when it came to crafting a conclusion that fit within previously established logic and laws of the game's universe. It is, simply put, a poorly told, poorly written ending, and the whole "fiasco" was crafted by the fan outrage that followed.

Nope, not at all..........to pretty much everything you've said here.

Now, you can speak in widely broad statements all day or get down and dirty friend, your choice.

That does absolutely nothing to properly refute anything I have said.

It reads like an invitation to debate, on the condition that you refine your complaints.

But if you won't take, and s/he really wants to argue, I suppose s/he would do well to elaborate first.

@feliciano182 said:

@Hailinel: Hence why I gave you the opening to further explain your arguments, you're obviously free to not do so, but nobody here can simply say the endings of Mass Effect 3 were bad simply because they cry "bad writing" without having a proper understanding of what that phrase actually means.

@Iodine: Not really, I just asked him / her to develop their arguments, so that I can properly refute them.

Actually, I do understand what bad writing is, and I gave a very brief summary on how the ending of the game falls into that. Everything is resolved after an explanation from the Catalyst, who just sort of shows up after Shepard just happened to pass out on an elevator that no one knew was even there. He is then asked to stop the reapers by either blowing up a piece of the crucible (somehow destroying all synthetic life in the galaxy by doing so), becoming the dominant force in the reaper superconsciousness by grabbing some conduits and allowing himself to be disintegrated, or be disintegrated by jumping into a beam of light to merge all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy. No matter what option the player chooses, a colored beam is shot from the crucible and is projected through the mass relay system, destroying them all. Meanwhile, Joker is apparently flying away (why is he suddenly doing this, and how did he get to a mass relay in enough time to have to outrun a beam? Further, why is he looking over his shoulder where he can't possibly see the anything other than the back of the cockpit? And how did everyone suddenly end up on the Normandy anyway?

There's a lack of logical sense and cohesion throughout the ending as it was originally presented. This is where the indoctrination theory came from. Fans couldn't conceive that the writers could fumble the ending so badly, so they tried to convince themselves that the confusing, absurd nature of the ending was intentional and that Shepard was indoctrinated all along, when it was just a case of poor writing.

The extended cut goes a long way in fixing a number of the problems that the original endings had, but in order to do so, it had to add a great deal of content, edit existing content, and outright remove some elements of the original endings. These new endings also take more of the player's choices into account and offer a greater degree of variation. These changes were also not necessary, in that Bioware was perfectly free to not change a thing and go on with their originally planned DLC development schedule, but the outcry was such that they went ahead and made the changes anyway.

Did the whole Sony hacking happen this year or last? Man, I don't remember anymore.

@Hippie_Genocide said:

For me, it was the whole fallout after Aris' comments on Cross Assault, and how some game journos (especially Kotaku), handled their coverage of it. And yes, that includes Klepek. This probably was a bigger deal to me because I'm more plugged into the FGC than any other gaming subculture.

Oh right, that whole "No, we can't have a fighting game community without sexism" quote. Man, that guy was pretty shitty wasn't he?

@Turambar said:

Did the whole Sony hacking happen this year or last? Man, I don't remember anymore.

@Hippie_Genocide said:

For me, it was the whole fallout after Aris' comments on Cross Assault, and how some game journos (especially Kotaku), handled their coverage of it. And yes, that includes Klepek. This probably was a bigger deal to me because I'm more plugged into the FGC than any other gaming subculture.

Oh right, that whole "No, we can't have a fighting game community without sexism" quote. Man, that guy was pretty shitty wasn't he?

The whole coverage of the FGC and the reaction to the incident was a disaster, both from the journalist side and especially the FGC. Aside from one commentator getting in trouble, I don't think a single thing ever changed. The fighting game community is still insular and self-congratulatory and the journalists dropped the story like a rock for the next big news item.

Also, the Sony hacking was last year.

@Hailinel said:

@Turambar said:

Did the whole Sony hacking happen this year or last? Man, I don't remember anymore.

@Hippie_Genocide said:

For me, it was the whole fallout after Aris' comments on Cross Assault, and how some game journos (especially Kotaku), handled their coverage of it. And yes, that includes Klepek. This probably was a bigger deal to me because I'm more plugged into the FGC than any other gaming subculture.

Oh right, that whole "No, we can't have a fighting game community without sexism" quote. Man, that guy was pretty shitty wasn't he?

The fighting game community is still insular and self-congratulatory and the journalists dropped the story like a rock for the next big news item.

The fighting game community is not a single community, there's many 'scenes' all over the world so how can you make such a sweeping statement? And lol, I love how people call out the FGC, like the Halo, Call of Duty and so on communities are any better, just like ANY community, their will be loud mouths, creeps, dicks and morons. Shocker.

As for anyone else still insulting the fighting game community: there's plenty of people who are very respectful, kind and and pleasant to be around all over the world who are also serious about their fighting games, stop making it sound like the FGC is a single entity that actually sets out to act immature constantly, when in reality the 'immaturity' is merely people having fun, yet they happen to be on stream sometime. Before anyone says, no, the sexism stuff from Aris doesn't count as 'fun', that was creepy.

Just because some people get on the mic at events and blabber shit doesn't mean the whole scene is fucked up and sexist. Evo has always been pretty tasteful, so how about you use that as the benchmark instead of when some guys are just having fun with their friends talking shit at a local event that happens to be streamed? (again, I do not excuse Aris)

Aris was a fucking moron for doing that shit to begin with, let alone on a fucking Capcom stream. Shame because he actually does some good content for Tekken and does know his shit.

@familyphotoshoot said:

Just a friendly reminder that Keighly is the cancer killing video games and you are a bad person if you visit Gametrailers and support him you are a bad person.

If more things happen like this... then I will gladly keep going to Gametrailers maybe once a month :D

ME3, but 38 studio's shenanigans takes a close second.

The Mass Effect stuff got ridiculous and I was closer to the THQ stuff (I would add all the stuff earlier in the year with the executive shake up, the 10 to 1 stock split) but the 38 Studios stuff was so depressing and it just kept going. I mean it sucks for the employees, they should have been given the heads-up earlier. The new Governor seems like kind of a dick and he is at least partly responsible for them not getting their second contract with EA and then he had the gull to sue them for not being able to pay after he screwed them or at least it seems that way. Curt Schilling was so passionate about this whole thing but turns out he's not great with business development and he got punished for it, I feel really bad for him.

@mosespippy said:

The stuff with 38 Studios was the biggest news event of the year but it's not a lasting event. The sexism issue came up over and over again because it's a big problem and is unfortunately going to remain one for generations.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I can't understand when people hope that this debate "fades away". Granted, it was, by no means, handled as it should, but the problem is as real as it gets. Ignoring it and hoping we can all continue to live our lives as if nothing is happening is completely stupid. Not to mention selfish.

@JasonR86 said:

I picked H because I didn't like how the Mass Effect option was worded. That game should have stood on its own and all of the people who were upset shouldn't have been pacified. Changing the ending, the DLC, the catering, the everything that developed after the game's release was an absolute shit-show. The fans looked like asses and Bioware and EA looked like hacks. By far it was the biggest fiasco of all.

The description of each option was meant to be a joke. In the case of ME3, a reference to one of the best movies ever made :(

ME3's shitstorm culminated in EA stealing money from charity.

It's an epic that will be told to children hundreds of years from now, in the way of Beowulf or Gilgamesh.

38 Studios going down is the biggest in my book. Unlike the ME3 dealy-o, lots of people lost their jobs, the State of Rhode Island is out 75 to 100 million dollars and with the lawsuits and such, this still is far from over. THQ's plight is somewhat similar, but it's been a long time coming. 38 Studios fall was sudden and devastating to everyone involved. Being upset about how a story ends pales in comparison to finding yourself out of work and deep in debt because you're company failed live up to its promises.

Though I suppose on that same thought process the "sexism" thing definitely qualifies.

Anita Sarkeesian took hundreds of thousands of dollars from gullible nerds and proceeded to never release a single video. Classic con artist. I really wish I had that picture of her sitting in front of a pile of games with the caption "THANKS FOR THE FREE SHIT" on hand, because THAT was the real story that never got covered in that shitstorm.

To me it's the whole 38 Studios event. Whereas the ME3 was just a bunch of people mad about a videogame ending, 38 was an utter disaster. People lost their jobs, numerous lawsuits, and Rhode Island is down 75 - 100 million dollars. Not to mention it was covered all throughout the mainstream media, unlike ME3.

@Demoskinos: Sure, but that shouldn't affect those people's ability to think and act rationally. You can care about something deeply and be angry about it sucking without being a part of that whole frenzy we saw in March.

SWTOR, surely. The most expensive game of all time falls flat on its face.

The ME3 ending being so bad that they had to apologise for it, have another go at it, start taking the Bioware branding off of everything and put the Docs out to pasture. That's some bad ending. Women casually getting treated like shit by the industry -and gamers defending their right to do so- is just business as usual.

I'd have said the whole Mass Effect 3 thing because people still talk about it, but I have to think that the War Z thing and/or 38 Studios seems to be more significant in terms of the industry, rather than a dustup over differing opinions over a game. But that's just me.

The biggest fiasco this year is by large Giantbomb's community showing extreme ignorance about sexism in video games, the industry and over all. Both showing great immaturity and plain stupidity. The thousands of comments and reactions of hate against Sarkeesian, Klepeck and any other person just bringing it up shows that this community has large gaps of knowledge, understanding and tolerance. Perhaps it's just reflects how society is overall so perhaps it's wrong to just blame the community of my favourite bombsite.

So the fiasco I would remember the most is Doritosgate and how it changed absolutely nothing. The game press will go on and walk the grey zone of journalistic integrity and downright greedy as fuck.

@Kovski said:

The thousands of comments and reactions of hate against Sarkeesian

Yeah, no. She stole hundreds of thousands of dollars and hasn't put out a single video. If Tim Schafer fucks up Double Fine's kickstarter (which, from the look of the last update, might just happen), he'd get his shit proverbially ruined. Why the fuck is she immune to criticism after failing to put out a fucking Youtube video after 8 months?

Bioware in general has been the biggest fiasco. Old Republic proved to be a failure, ME3 had a ridiculously bad ending and the two Doctors left the company. I think Bioware will stay around for a good while longer, but I think the days of them being the number 1 guys for RPG's is over. Their games will gradually bring in less and less money until EA just close the doors on them.

38 Studios is a close second. They poured a ridiculous amount of money into an unproven IP that ended up being one of the blandest RPG's in recent memories. Even if they didn't go bust, the fact they thought they could use the same world and lore to create an MMO is almost laughable. It's sad to see so many people lose their jobs, but whoever was in charge of managing those projects must have had some screws loose. Develop a game world and build up a fanbase, before spending millions in multiple projects revolving around it.

The sexism stuff was pretty bad too. Not only because of the numerous articles from people pretending to know what they're talking about, but the general lack of maturity and common sense from the general gaming community. Being male and not wanting females depicted as underage school girls that need defending by everyone with a penis, doesn't make someone a "white knight".

@Hailinel:

Actually, I do understand what bad writing is, and I gave a very brief summary on how the ending of the game falls into that.

Somewhere else you did.

Everything is resolved after an explanation from the Catalyst, who just sort of shows up after Shepard just happened to pass out on an elevator that no one knew was even there.

Everything is resolved after you make a choice that has massive consequences on the galaxy, and which is also meant to be reflected and pondered on, and while the ending certainly needed to reflect a little of the choices, the content is still what's important, what choice do you make once it no longer becomes so simple to just kill the reapers ?

To many, it was still that simple, even if their choice was genocide, and not solving the essential conflict.

No matter what option the player chooses, a colored beam is shot from the crucible and is projected through the mass relay system, destroying them all. Meanwhile, Joker is apparently flying away (why is he suddenly doing this, and how did he get to a mass relay in enough time to have to outrun a beam? Further, why is he looking over his shoulder where he can't possibly see the anything other than the back of the cockpit? And how did everyone suddenly end up on the Normandy anyway?

First, you're arguing that because all the endings look the same, there's nothing to learn or analyze from them, which is absurd.

Second, this has been debunked to death, Joker sees a gigantic wave approaching him, Joker reacts as any pilot would and avoids it, how does it make sense to let the ship take in what could very well be the expanding wave of a massive explosion ? It's logical to assume it's dangerous and just fly away, as for people getting back on the normandy, I thought that was weird when I first saw it, just as much as you, however, rather than inmediately projecting my anger relentlessly at the TV screen and subsequently in the internet (not saying you did), I decided to think "Well, surely Bioware has a logical answer to that", and they actually did, the Normandy picked them up.

There's a lack of logical sense and cohesion throughout the ending as it was originally presented. This is where the indoctrination theory came from. Fans couldn't conceive that the writers could fumble the ending so badly, so they tried to convince themselves that the confusing, absurd nature of the ending was intentional and that Shepard was indoctrinated all along, when it was just a case of poor writing.

Friend, I don't want to be a dick, I think this conversation can be perfectly civil and educated, but you're speaking in vague statements again, you're not explaining why there's a lack of logical sense and cohesion, you're just saying it and expecting me to accept it.

And by god, please not "The Indoctrination Theory", that is the worst, most absurd piece of trite ever conceived by any fanbase I have ever had the displeasure to meet, it is a simplified version of the "it was all a dream" type of endings, it proposed that any kind of intelligent content worthy of being pondered and reflected on does not belong in the Mass Effect franchise, and that what fans truly deserve is for Shepard to get up, go through the macho-hero motions, kill Harbinger, and get back to Earth to marry his LI.

That friend, a theory like that, is only worthy of the undesired product of nausea.

These changes were also not necessary, in that Bioware was perfectly free to not change a thing and go on with their originally planned DLC development schedule, but the outcry was such that they went ahead and made the changes anyway.

*Bioware releases game with ending*

Fans: BIOWARE SUCK ! They never listen to their fans !

*Bioware expands on ending*

Fans: BIOWARE SUCK ! They yielded to their fans' wishes !

@JoeyRavn:

That reference went right over my head.

38 studios collapse was pretty fucked up.